I would love to use Amarok to listen to Midi files (which commonly have the extension mid, or midi). The xine engine doesn't understand them but there are other engines out there that do, (TiMidity being the one that comes to mind).

If Amarok could send the file to the appropriate engine based on file type, then it improve functionality. I supposed it could then be used to have video lists as well, if it were completely configurable.

Definitely won't happen, sorry. In fact we've long been tending towards supporting only one engine, getting rid of the multiple engine concept.

Anyhoo.. chances are that xinelib will at some point support midi. Why not talk to the xine developers?

What's the point of listening to midi-files anyway?
To get a good sounding midi-file you need proper ewuipment. Most Midi-Soundchiups on soundcards only have realy bad sounds...
It's a format for musicians (and mybe for backgroundmusic in some games...), but not for music-listeners...

hell, why listen to anything?

Well I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset anyone, but MIDI-Files simply aren't meant to be "heard" to. They are Musical Data for use with MIDI-Ewupment, like Synthesizers, Samplers etc. I don't understand why anyone should listen to music stored as MIDI-File. Except for someone with good MIDI-Equipment like a real good sounding Roland Canvas or any other General Midi-Device, but no Soundcard on the market has good sounding instruments (except maybe for some pro-Audio cards). Okay with soundfonts you maybe can load good instruments in a card, but MIDI-Files really aren't made to listen to them, you can get the scores of a track from them, so if you want to remix a song it's cool to get that hole song as MIDI-File...
Okay maybe iplayfast  could tell me why he listens to MIDI-FIles and what equipment he has???

Greetz
deLooco

I am a KDE and MIDI user and developer of MIDI software. One of my programs is KMid2: a MIDI/karaoke player for KDE4.
http://userbase.kde.org/KMid2

I agree that selecting the engine based on the mime type or file extension would be nice. For instance, VLC supports MIDI playback (if it was compiled enabling the FluidSynth library, and a SoundFont has been configured). There are good software synthesizers, enabling MIDI playback without requiring expensive professional hardware.

Why listen MIDI files instead of, say MP3? Well, there are unique features in MIDI, like time stretching and pitch shifting without losing quality. This is ideal for applications like karaoke, and for education.

MIDI is for sound like vector graphics is for image: scalable. And nobody says that SVG is only for artists.

but following your analogy, SVG is for graphic design/drawing, and rasters are for pictures. Gwenview and digikam don't work with svg's, right?

in the same line, MIDIs are for synth/music creation, editing, while waves are for listening.

engines live below amarok. changing them on the fly from within amarok would be a mess. the proper way to do it would be to use an engine that supported midi.

in this case, try to get the xine people to include support for it, as markey suggested (but i have the feeling they won't like the idea either...)

Both gwenview and digikam support SVG files. In digikam you need to open Settings->Configure digikam and add the svg extension in the MIME types category, it will be activated after restarting the program. Gwenview has SVG support out of the box. The same for krita, gimp and gqview. It is not a surprise such wide support for this format, because SVG rendering is included in Qt4, so it is available for all KDE applications with little or no cost, and for gnome applications it is supported by the cairo library. So, most graphics engines come with SVG rendering capability.

Phonon engines with MIDI rendering support are VLC (the Phonon backend lives at KDE SVN playground), GStreamer (using gstreamer-plugins-bad) and QuickTime for Mac OSX. All of them with simple/basic MIDI rendering into audio. For advanced rendering control you need something like kmid2, or Rosegarden.

I don't know why Xine developers would be against the idea of supporting basic MIDI rendering. Do you know that for sure?

plcl wrote:I don't know why Xine developers would be against the idea of supporting basic MIDI rendering. Do you know that for sure?

Why not just ask the xine developers

iplayfast wrote:If Amarok could send the file to the appropriate engine based on file type, then it improve functionality. I supposed it could then be used to have video lists as well, if it were completely configurable.

Amarok doesn't choose the engine, and if it did it seems like it would kinda defeat the purpose of Phonon. Or did I misunderstand what you were getting at?

I can understand why the Xine folk would not wand to get into the whole midi rendering thing, the rendering should either be done by the hardware or Timidity in alsa daemon mode, or some other software solution equivalent to Timidity in daemon mode.

If the alsa midi support is functional, don't know why the Xine devs would not want to support midi playback.

Personally I have not found that many midi files that I thought were that good that I would want to include them in my music playlists. Maybe they sounded better on the systems they were created on. I suspect part of the problem is custom instruments that give a different sound than your stock set of midi instruments.

In the past when I compared Timidity to my soublaster live and audigy cards I actually liked the way Timidity sounded better, with Timidity the CPU usage can be significant at times. Personally if I had a midi file I wanted to add to my collection and play it in Amarok, I would just render it to an audio file and add the audio file to my collection, Timidity does that as well. If you have a recent enough release of Debian or Ubuntu, fluid-soundfont-gs and fluid-soundfont-gm are available in the repositories. If they are not available for your Debian/Ubuntu based distro you can use the package search, the package don't have any dependencies....

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywo ... ection=all

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywo ... ection=all

Not the most compact set of instruments, but it's one of 3 or 4 soundfonts I always gravitated towards.

Later, Seeker

FYI, the xine backend (and all other backends) are about to become deprecated anyway.

We are working on a new backend (for all platforms) that is using LibVLC. Accordingly, this backend will be called Phonon-VLC.

Seeker, you answered a post older than 2 years now, there is really not much point in doing that, don't you think? Of course the poster was talking about Amarok 1.4.x

Also, "the Xine folks" are exactly one developer, I don't think it is not wanting, but simply not having enough time to do anything.

Mamarok wrote:Seeker, you answered a post older than 2 years now, there is really not much point in doing that, don't you think? Of course the poster was talking about Amarok 1.4.x

DOH!!! Bad habit I guess of not looking at the date of the original posts, when there are new posts.

If there is going to be a single backend I personally probably would have preferred gstreamer, since Songbird already uses gstreamer for their stuff, but I expect VLC to be good and look forward to it.

Later, Seeker